Notes and Music

Thomson was not only the finest music critic America has produced—although Paul Rosenfeld has a rightful claim to comparable eminence—he was one of the notable American composers of his time. His Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1928) stands worthily beside the far more famous orchestral music of Aaron Copland. His Portraits, over 100 of them, most no longer than a minute or two, were composed while his subjects were sitting in front of him, as though posing for a painter. These were sufficiently well-known that a prehistoric Peanuts strip featured Charlie Brown sitting for his musical portrait by his pianist-friend, Schroeder, who cited Virgil Thomson as his inspiration. (Sadly, Charlie Brown was such a hapless nullity that Schroeder could not produce a single note.) Thomson also set to music poems by William Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, John Donne, William Blake, Marianne Moore, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein, and Kenneth Koch, as well as a funeral oration by Bishop Bossuet.  

He labored as a journeyman for stage and screen, turning out the only-in-America ballet Filling Station (1938) and writing incidental music for various plays, including Orson Welles’s 1936 voodoo Macbeth with the Negro Theater Project and Peter Brook’s televised King Lear (1953). He scored several documentary and feature films, among them Louisiana Story (1948), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, the only time a film score was so honored. His most impressive writing for film, however, comes in the final movement of the suite from The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), in which a simple fugue evokes the relentless scouring winds that devastated the heartland and created the Dust Bowl.

But it is chiefly for his operas—Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), The Mother of Us All (1947), and Lord Byron (1972)—that Thomson the composer is known today, insofar as he is known at all, for even these works tend to be put on only in smaller opera houses or in student productions, and recordings are few and far between. And yet Four Saints in Three Acts, which actually presents some 30 saints in four acts, made Thomson, by his own description, the most famous composer in the world, if only for a season.  

Gertrude Stein wrote the libretto, which hovers in that neverland of affectation due south of the unintelligible. Frederick Ashton provided elegantly swooping and sensually shimmying choreography, the singers’ every movement “regulated to the music, measure by measure,” in Thomson’s words. The set was designed by Florine Stettheimer, a reclusive exquisite whose winning credential was the Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria décor of her own bedroom, charmed with such touches as “a baldachino of black chiffon and bunches of black ostrich plumes just like a Spanish funeral,” Thomson gushed. John Houseman enjoyed his first directing gig, though he sweated buckets. An all-black cast sang and danced and gave the show the cachet of the inconceivable and, therefore, the ever so necessary. 

A formidable publicity machine—Thomson was as impressively connected as a Mafia chieftain—compelled everyone, distinguished or pretentious or both, to show up at the event. Then, of course, there was Thomson’s music: decorous, decorative, understated, somehow almost making sense of Stein’s gibbering, and, as seen from the distance of 80 years, pretty much an afterthought to the whole affair. The music impressed the intellectuals but not the musicians in the audience, who reserved their admiration for the spectacular spectacle.  

The opera traveled from Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum to Broadway, which is as unlikely a spot as one can think of for a production such as this to turn up, and then it took off for points west. Four Saints was a smash hit, but Thomson’s celebrity soon fizzled out, and he would never be lionized like this again.

When writing prose, however, he could roar like a lion. With his very first Herald Tribune review, he disposed of Jean Sibelius’s Second Symphony and the ninnies of the Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, who had convinced themselves and the public that Sibelius’s symphonies were serious music, when, in fact, they were “vulgar, self-indulgent, and provincial beyond all description.” It is hard to resist the retort that Thomson is the one indulging himself here and that his opinion represents the provincialism of musical Paris, where he lived for some 15 years in the 1920s and ’30s. While Sibelius wrote under the influence of Tchaikovsky, another popular hero undeserving of such esteem, Thomson adored Erik Satie, who represented the pinnacle of 20th-century musical achievement precisely because he demonstrated no interest in scaling the heights and, instead, modestly showed “us all a way of admitting humor to musical expression on a basis of equality with sadness.”

The Central European “immortality machine”—whose sinister reach extended into Russia and Scandinavia and the depths of Manhattan—with its hammed-up Weltschmerz, and even more repugnant ecstatic transports, illustrated how far wrong Romantic music and the cult of the anguished but astonishing genius had gone. Small was beautiful for Virgil Thomson. Ambition was to be respected only if it served sincere feeling; hell-bent despondency or stellar magnificence was almost invariably found guilty of insincerity and the craving for applause. 

As damning evidence of this widespread corruption, Thomson adduces no less a figure than Ludwig van Beethoven, whose greatness (in Thomson’s view) inclines toward grandiosity. The inventor of “the editorial symphony”—witness, most egregiously, the final movement of his Fifth, says Thomson—Beethoven infected subsequent generations of composers with ready-made extravagance of sentiment, often in the name of unexceptionable and thus uninteresting political ideas that serviced these self-proclaimed titans’ need for mass adulation.

Superstar conductors in the thrall of the magnificos and their own colossal importunity perpetuate all the wrong values. In “The Toscanini Case,” Thomson likens the celebrity conductor to the shameless Felix Mendelssohn “just making the music, like his baton, go round and round, if he finds his audience’s attention tending to waver. No piece has to mean anything specific; every piece has to provoke from its hearers a spontaneous vote of acceptance. This is what I call the ‘wow technique.’ ” The crowd goggles and gasps, and Thomson cries, “Please stop the monkeyshines.”

For his own part, Thomson wrote music in a defiantly plainspoken and casual vein, and he often wrote music criticism in a defensively pugnacious one. Although his parti pris is too frequently flagrant and his animus misconceived, Thomson at his best is nevertheless as good as they come. Here is a passage from a 1949 memorial essay, for instance, that justly honors Bela Bartok’s “nobility of soul.” 

This is just one of hundreds of observations and judgments that possess the authority of high intelligence joined to deep feeling. This collection ought to be read straight through—all thousand pages or so—if one is to appreciate Thomson’s fine detail-work and potent moral force. One feels obliged to note his critical missteps, in his unspoken but obvious campaign to justify the sort of music he himself wrote and to topple the monuments that obscured his own comparatively minor talent and achievement. But one willingly forgives Thomson his opinions on Beethoven, Sibelius, and Satie when he wrote so much so well. 

Algis Valiunas is a writer in Florida.